No, there haven’t always been this many trans people. No, they’re not just coming out more because it’s more acceptable now. Here’s the evidence.

As gender clinic referrals in the UK and beyond continue to spike — with the average gender clinic patient now an autistic female in her teen years — many more people have begun to realize what this blog has been saying for over five years: that the transgender phenomenon is a culture-bound syndrome, promulgated by regressive social forces.

1,800 girls (and 700 boys) started down the path to sterility and shorter lifespans this year alone at a single clinic in the UK. If you ask trans activists, the reason for this is quite simple and easy to explain: as trans identities become less stigmatized and more understood, more people become willing to express their true transgender identity.

By way of comparison, these trans activists point to the clear increase in the out-of-closet gay, lesbian, and bisexual population, an increase that began roughly at the time when Gay Pride and acceptance became more mainstream.

It’s an explanation that has worked to get people to shut up who might have otherwise made a big fuss. It’s worked to silence government officials and ordinary people on social media, who don’t want to seem like they are on the “wrong side of history.”

Which calls to mind the question: what does history have to say about the prevalence of trans people, versus the prevalence of gay ones?

Fortunately for us, sex researchers in the 20th century explored this question at length, and performed in-depth interviews about sexual preferences and desires on tens of thousands of total subjects. Perhaps the most famous of these researchers was Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

Through a series of questions asked of both men and women, Kinsey worked to uncover the sexual fetishes, inclinations, and hidden secrets. While some of Kinsey’s work has since been criticized, no one can doubt that he brought the prevalence of homosexuality to the world’s attention.

According to Kinsey’s estimates from 1948 and 1953, 1-3 percent of women, and 4 percent of men, were exclusively homosexual since the time of their adolescence until the time of their interview with sex researchers. Even larger numbers had been exclusively homosexual for a few years, and a still larger number had engaged in some homosexual activity.

Kinsey believed that the true prevalence of homosexuality in the human population was as high as 10%, a number that captured the public’s imagination all the way into the 21st century.

While other sex researchers obtained different (typically lower) numbers for the prevalence of homosexuality, any researcher conducting interviews calculated a prevalence of over 1 percent. It was a clear phenomenon: in any reasonable sample size, multiple people would be included who had engaged in homosexual contact, preferred same-sex sexual partners, or were exclusively homosexually attracted.

So when homosexual toleration became more common in late 20th century western society, starting in the most cosmopolitan and liberal cities, and later evolved to include homosexual marriage and the ability to have a fully “out” homosexual family, it was no surprise that more people came out of the closet as gay, lesbian, and bisexual.

As attitudes liberalized, it became clear that the gay population had been “hiding in plain sight,” visible to any researchers who examined the desires of the population, and only invisibilized by stigma and shame. Today, NIH surveys indicate that between 1 and 2 percent of the American population identifies as exclusively homosexual, with another .7% identifying as bisexual.

Since homophobia has not yet been eradicated (and is still extremely strong in some pockets of even western liberal democracies), it wouldn’t be surprising, given the interview-based estimates of sex researchers, if the homosexual population as much as doubled in a society with no anti-homosexual prejudice whatsoever.

Kinsey’s examination of the sexual psyche went far beyond same sex vs. opposite sex attraction. Kinsey and other researchers at his institute and beyond studied a range of sexual behaviors, including the phenomenon of crossdressing / transvestitism / transsexuality.*

Kinsey became interested in cross-sex identification and behavior toward the end of his life, spurred on by interviews with crossdressers. At the time, the Kinsey Institute interviewed what it believed to represent literally every individual, of both sexes, who had up to that time received sexual reassignment surgeries — a total of about 150 male-to-females and 2 female-to-males.

He also searched diligently for records of all known crossdressers, but of course, this wouldn’t reveal those who were wrestling privately with feelings of gender incongruity.

So we must look beyond Kinsey for estimates of trans people. This, unfortunately for trans activists, is where contemporary trans ideology is shown to be almost uniquely ahistorical in sex research.

Before the year 2000, researchers in many countries conducted studies into the prevalence of transsexuality in the population. These studies were remarkable in the similarity of their findings. Whether in the Netherlands, Singapore, the UK, or Germany, transsexuals occurred at a rate of around 1:2,500-1:20,000 people, and a male:female sex ratio of anywhere from 2:1 to 6:1 existed in the transsexual population.

Even today, outside of the West, the prevalence of “third gender” or transsexual populations often remains quite in line with what was observed by sex researchers in the 20th century. A recent census of the hijra population of India showed that 1 in 2,600 Indian nationals are included in the category.

However, trans activists continually insist that there is a far larger, “hidden” transgender population that simply cannot be observed by these surveys, that cannot be seen in sexual research institutes, and so on. Starting in the early 2000s, activists for trans causes began to promulgate the hypothesis that the “real number” of trans people was far higher than anyone had yet revealed.

For example, in the last link above, transgender campaigners in India claim the true prevalence of trans people in India is 6-7x higher than the census would reveal.

These “fudge factors” are prominent in nearly all estimates of trans prevalence that have been given media attention lately, and many of these estimates are based on an original study that had deep methodological flaws and enshrined the fudge-factor-fication of transgender population estimates for decades to come.

In 2002, Lynn Conway, a male who identified as female, sought to depict transgender identity as far more common than previous studies had considered. In the study, Conway creates a decade-by-decade table of SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) prevalence, starting in the 1960s, with a “rough estimate of SRS operations done by major SRS surgeons both here and abroad on U. S. citizens in recent decades, extrapolated to include those done by many secondary surgeons (each performing smaller numbers per year).”

Do you see the start of the fudge factor? Conway takes the absolute best guess from the leading clinical practitioner of the number of total sex reassignment surgeries performed in the entire United States in all years of all decades up to 1973 — 2,500 — and extrapolates this number to 7,000 surgeries performed in the 1970s alone. Based on anecdotal evidence (like a leading SRS surgeon performing two surgeries per day!), Conway concludes that the numbers have been rising, and that by 2002, there must be 40,000 post-op male-to-female transsexuals living in the United States alone.

He assumes in this estimate that exactly zero of these surgery recipients since the 1960s have died, and so bases a new prevalence estimate of surgery recipients on a strict division between his imagined 40,000 post-op transsexuals and the 2002 population, and comes out with 1:2,500 as the ratio of post-op MTFs in America.

Then, Conway “estimates at least 3 to 5 times as many people suffer intense MtF transsexualism as those who have already undergone SRS.”

The fudge factor multiplies again. Recall that Conway was already (at least) doubling the number of actual SRS surgeries performed. Now, the number is multiplied again, by three to five times.

This kind of “fudge factor” is not the norm when estimating the prevalence of stigmatized sexual behavior. When Kinsey overestimated the homosexual population at 10 percent, he based this idea on the statistics at hand indicating that up to 10 percent of men had been exclusively homosexual for multiple years — he didn’t simply multiply his estimates to assume an arbitrary number of hidden homosexuals.

Yet the studies used in the early 2000s to estimate the prevalence of transgenderism all use these kinds of “estimates” from researchers, which are all but pulled out of a hat. By estimating hidden populations that cannot be proven, transgenderism was made into something so prevalent that it wasn’t surprising when teens began reporting record numbers of trans identities.

The most commonly-used estimates of the transgender population in the United States have come from the Williams Institute of UCLA. Their 2011 report that first documents a high transgender prevalence in the United States uses statistics gathered from … Lynn Conway’s 2002 study.

The fudge factor doesn’t end there. In 2016, the Williams Institute released another report, estimating the transgender population of the United States as .6 percent of the total population, based on research from the CDC.

There’s … just one problem. The CDC survey didn’t estimate the trans population as .6 percent. In fact, the 2016 behavioral study cited by the Williams Institute said that just .1 percent of Americans identified as female-to-male transgender, and .2 percent as male-to-female transgender — a total of .3 percent, or half of what the Williams Institute claimed the data had indicated. An additional .1 percent designated themselves gender non-conforming.

Once again, we see that same male:female ratio of 2:1, within the bounds of the ratios for trans estimates for over 50 years.

It’s this ratio that most clearly illustrates the social contagion aspects of the modern transgender condition. Not only has the prevalence of transgender symptoms soared, the ratio has completely reversed, with 3 young female patients seeking reassignment to a more masculine presentation for every 1 male patient seeking feminization.

Not one sex researcher in history — not one, and if you find one, comment here and I will append this immediately — found that more females wanted to change sex than males. Not in any country, not in any age group. Not until the social contagion phenomenon known as ROGD, or rapid-onset gender dysphoria, began.

Anyone pretending that this is simply a case of trans people “hiding in plain sight” until they were acknowledged and validated by the population at large is kidding themselves — or deliberately skewing data for their own agenda.

The data shows clearly that the trans population is smaller than the most common estimates given — and the Williams Institute should be ashamed for turning fudged or even faked data into the single most-cited source for estimates of the transgender population. And not one of these estimates, regardless of their “fudge factor,” indicates a prevalence of hidden female transsexuals that is far larger than the prevalence of male transsexuals.

This is not like the gay rights movement, which could easily point to research indicating a significant population percentage with latent or expressed homosexual desires. This is a movement with a vested interest in overestimating their prevalence in order to further an agenda which has changed significantly since the dawn of the 21st century.

For more on why that happened, and the history of the changes to this movement, keep watching this blog.

* — It probably seems insensitive to lump these three ideas together, but at the time, the borders between them were seen as quite porous, even by crossdressers, transvestites, and transsexuals. It’s these blurred borders that cause so much strife today over whether activists like Marsha Johnson were transgender or crossdressers.

These lines may be blurring once more today, as the big tent of transgenderism has begun to include crossdressers and transvestites again, at least according to Stonewall UK.

7 thoughts on “No, there haven’t always been this many trans people. No, they’re not just coming out more because it’s more acceptable now. Here’s the evidence.”

Thank you. Not only have you strengthened by understanding of trans statistics, you’ve also blown my mind on bi/homo/heterosexuality statistics! I’d always paid lip service to the 10% narrative. I am flattened.

I always thought the L and G were a little higher of a percentage than 1% and that the 10%, accepted on faith for a long time, included all MSM regardless of their self identity. The part that’s surprising is “.7% identifying as bisexual”. That number doesn’t crunch. The prevalent understanding seems to be that there are a lot more people, male and female, who are bi than who are actually full-on, exclusively gay. Maybe the key word is “identifying”. Not everyone who has same-sex hankerings acts on it, let alone embraces it as an identity. The pressure to be heterosexual is on whether you are LG or B. Bs in straight relationship become heterosexual by default. That’s the whole Schrödinger’s gay phenomenon.

“Not one sex researcher in history — not one, and if you find one, comment here and I will append this immediately — found that more females wanted to change sex than males. Not in any country, not in any age group. Not until the social contagion phenomenon known as ROGD, or rapid-onset gender dysphoria, began.”

There is an old (from 1980 IIRC) polish report (“Transsexualism and anatomic sex ratio reversal in Poland” by Julian Godlewski, M.D.) that found reversed ratio – on average 5 females for 1 male. The author himself considers this noteworthy because his findings were abnormal compared to other reports. I’m not aware if there was a follow-up, but the number itself was consistent (not like the sudden change in the UK).

Have you seen the other piece of crazy nonsense produced by the Williams Institute: a document that purports to show the prevalence of “trans” in each US state – stratified by age group? 😹 They extrapolate madly from responses to CDC’s telephone survey in 19/50 states. Pretty ridiculous!

Thanks so much for your work here. As a scientist, I have been astonished by the number of people who SAY they are scientists and then say that my analysis of a piece of research is wrong and that trans is an established factual category whereas biological sex is clearly a made up social construct. When I try to engage them in discussions of sample size, controls, statistical significance, confounding factors, conflicts of interest, and other stuff that needs to be done with EVERY scientific paper, they curse at me. Some of the people who this actually do have scientific training, which makes it even worse.